Monday, September 29, 2008

This week Darrin joined Lloyd, Andrej and Amanda. He showed up a bit early and made his character; Specialist William Harris (Combat Engineer). He was still finishing up as we started to play.

The adventure picked up on the road Northwest of Krakow, Poland. Fisher, Watts and Davis continued along their way – rucksacks about 30lbs heavier - leaving the scene of the ambush behind them. While taking a break in the early afternoon, concealed in a stand of trees by a crossroads, another soldier in an American uniform come strolling up from the west. After challenging the soldier and a brief exchange of bravado, they determined that they were of a like mind and decided to carry on their merry way together.

In the late afternoon they came across some farmers working in a field. After a little chit-chat they were invited back for supper in exchange for Cpl. Watts doing the rounds of the communal farm/small village. After dispensing much advice, a few aspirins and a handful of the few remaining anit-biotics he had, they all had their bellies filled with the first home-cooked meals they’d had in a while. They then stayed the night as the farmers advised it wouldn’t be safe to carry on into Krakow this late in the evening.

The next morning they wandered into Krakow, past miles of rubble, constantly picked over by scattered scavengers, and mine-fields which also were being picked over by scavengers – though fewer, and every so often they heard the report of one scavenger being not-so-lucky.

Eventually, they ran into a patrol of the ORMO (the Krakow defence force). They were escorted to a check point where they met with the patrols commander. There they were issued temporary papers that allowed them to travel from the checkpoint to the city hall where they could apply for permanent citizenship papers.

They made their way into the center of the city where there were more and more standing buildings and even some that were occupied. The city center was like a walled medieval city – complete with rebuilt ramparts and gates. Once at the city hall they were held ina waiting area for over six hours before they were brought before the Rada (the town council).

The council questioned them briefly and then issued them provisional citizenship papers and explained to them that they would have to return in a month with proof that they had found gainful employment or were conducting legitimate business of their own to have their citizenship ratified. The Rada suggested that Cpl. Watts try the hospital as they were always looking for qualified medical personnel.

The group then found their way to the hospital and after a short interview Cpl. Watts was offered work at the hospital. He would have to stay in the hospital residence and would be given three square meals a day, and work 12 hour shifts…. But it was better than starving to death or being killed by soviets or bandits – which he had lived in constant threat of for the last month.

The rest of the group bid him TTFN and wandered back outside the walled part of the city in search of an abandoned building to crash in for the night…..

Saturday, September 27, 2008

I love hats. I have quite a collection. I use them all the time when playing wargames. Whenever I've run Savage Worlds Demos at conventions and stuff I've brought along a hat for each character. It helps with immediate identification of who is who and sometimes even helps the players get into the role.

When their characters were more or less finished we started off the campaign with a quick little encounter on the road northwest of Krakow, Poland. I don’t want to go into too much detail as there are a couple other players that will be joining us that missed this episode and it should really be up to those that were there how much they let on about what happened. Essentially they investigated the site of an ambush. More on that later….

For anyone familiar with the campaign I basically skipped the Escape from Kalisz scenario and dropped them right into the Free City of Krakow… well… on the road Northwest of Krakow where the first encounter takes place…

Monday, September 22, 2008

WE will be STARTING at 8PM sharp! So show up anytime after about 7:30 but before 8PM. I give out bennies at 8PM if you aren't here you don't get any!!!

I will be accepting bribes for bennies as in the past, but as I've been trying to cut back on the root beer consumption (and doing pretty good, I've only had two in the last 14 weeks) I will now ONLY accept ORGANIC root beer as bribes for bonus bennies. Santa Cruz are available from Steep Hill Food Co-op and I think there’s one available at some Safeways… (“Brews” or something like that…).

Also anyone that posts a comment on this blog with their (or rather their CHARACTER’s) take on the evenings adventure will get a bonus benny the next week.

Next post I’ll get to some actual house Rules for the Savage Worlds System!

Sunday, September 21, 2008

As I mentioned in the previous post I’ve got my weekly Savage Worlds game up and running again on Saturday evenings (Savage Saturday!). I’ve been running weekly games for quite some time now. 7 years with the core members of the current group. I’ve taken a few breaks, here and there, and we’ve switched games and campaigns quite a bit. We’ve even switched times (sometimes Saturdays, sometimes Sundays…). I took the summer off gaming all together to concentrate on.. well… other things.

Around mid-August I sent out notes to the lads suggesting that we get Savage Saturdays going again. The problem was what to play

WHAT TO PLAY….

I wasn’t really sure where to begin…. There are so many things I’d like to do! Campaigns I’d like to run… So many choices, so little time. I got my whole life ahead of me though and I’ll get to them all eventually…

So I threw a bunch of ideas out to the guys to see what they would be most interested in playing… What would inspire them to show up week after week? Here are some of the options (Note: while many of these are games themselves we would be using Savage Worlds and just make use of the worlds and adventures):

Space:1889 – the old GDW game set in the colonial era except with interplanetary travel through ether flyers. All the colonial powers have colonies on the various planets around the solar system – Mercury, Venus, and Mars. A little like ERB’s John Carter of Mars… But not really.

Rippers – Victorian Monster hunters track down evil across the globe. Not only do I have all the adventures in the book – I also picked up the Rippers’ Companion a while back – which has more that I haven’t even LOOKED at yet… I still have most of their old characters kicking around somewhere… October is apparently Rippers Month at PEG

Tour of Darkness – the Vietnam war with a weird twist. I have a complete campaign in the book plus lots of old Recon adventures to fill in the gaps between weird ToD adventures. They’d start out as ordinary grunts, and quickly move into a Long Range Reconaissance Patrol (which makes things easier, because then they’d be more or less operating on your own out in the middle of nowhere…).

Necessary Evil – Supervillians united against an alien invasion. This was my least favourite option… but I do have the book and it has a ready-made campaign… With new characters or the old ones that some of the players made when we tried it a number of years back…

Other Supers….? I suggested we could make a pile of Super-heroes for an on again off again of superhero one shots just to take a break and change the pace from time to time…. I have no particular campaign in mind… I just know some of the guys are keen on the supers…

Zombie Run – A mini-campaign of a road trip across a zombie infested America…

Twilight: 2000 – I have a pile of the original adventures. You generally play military types trapped in Europe after the third world war has more or less fizzled out. There has been a limited strategic nuclear exchange and infrastructure and order has completely gone out the window and it's every man for himself...

Sci-Fi – Traveller? Again I own the Savage Worlds Sci-fi tool kits (well… at least the Gear and Bestiary…) and PILES of old Traveller adventures that could be strung together in a universe trotting campaign of sorts…. Of course I was also thinking of figuring out how to build ‘Mechs using the Sci-fi Gear Toolkit for a military/mercenary type campaign… Mmmmmmm… Battlemechs….

Fantasy – lots of old D&D adventures floating around. Hundreds of free ones on the internet… I know I’ve tried running Fantasy campaigns in the past and they always seem to fizzle – I think the problem is I try to make them into sprawling tolkien-esque EPIC adventures, and then just can’t keep them going…. So I thought about a making up a new batch of low-lifes and going on a series of old school dungeon crawls, living hand to mouth on whatever treasures they can haul away…? We could bring back theirr old characters (that whole weird dream sequence thing…) or roll up new random ones – which is, of course, always a tonne of fun when using the Fantasy Character Generator toolkit (Seriously, just spend an evening rolling up random characters – there will be no end of laughs…!)

Pulp Adventure/Weird War Two – A group of intrepid heroes battle gangsters, weird cults, Nazis and their evil minions in the 20’s and 30’s. Again I think I still have some old characters some of them used in the past…

Call of Cthulhu– a group of paranormal investigators delves into strange happenings and combat cosmic evil… Again, no end of books full of adventures…

Pirates of the Spanish Main – This was the most recent campaign we had been playing in when things fizzled out in the spring. We could more or less pick up where we left off…?

So… I don’t know, I was pretty much equally fired up about any of them right now… Actually the ones I’d be most interested in running right now are the ones I’m figured every one else would be LEAST interested in (Twilight:2000 and Tour of Darrkness)… So I asked if there were any one(s) the players would particularly like to play?

I also proposed that maybe we could make characters for a couple (or ALL!?) of them and jump back and forth depending on whatever suites my fancy on any particular evening.

I also proposed some “skirmish options” – straight up skirmish miniature wargames using Savage Worlds. I won’t bother going over those.

The players response was that they were interested mostly in Role-playing so the Skimish options were all immediately turfed. I can play most of those with the Monday night crew anyway…

It seemed most were willing to do just about anything. Rippers, Zombie Run, callof Cthulhu, Pirates, and Necessary Evil seemed to be the most popular.

Then I got a brainwave:

SPACE RIPPERS: 1889!

Werewolves on Mars, Vampires on Venus.... you don't want to know what's lurking in the tunnels of Mercury....

A special blend of the Rippers and Space:1889 settings. Still set in the height of the Victorian era, hunting monsters.... we'd just expand that a bit and include some Martians... Will the Cabal try and recruit the Red Martians...? Oh yeah baby! That definitely moved up on my list of things to play…!

So anyway our first session was last night and Lloyd, Andrej, and Amanda showed up and we made characters for a Savaged Twilight:2000 and started making characters for Zombie Run. Before getting the second batch of charcters done I ran a quick little introductory adventure for Twilight: 2000. More on that in a separate post!

Friday, September 19, 2008

Savage Saturday is being rekindled this very weekend and I thought I'd start a new blog to chronicle the events of the various adventures and campaigns I run. I guess I could have done it on the other bog but the focus is more about the hobby and playing of miniature wargames. Savage Worlds, in my opinion, can walk a fine line between the two at times - which is why I love it so.... The Saturday night games, however, do involve a bit more "role-playing", and so I decided to start a separate blog.

My plan is to do a quick write up of the events of each Saturday night along with a few pictures. This is to let friends that are not able to come out because they live 500+Km away know what shenanigans I've been up to. Perhaps it could also serve as a source of inspiration to other Savage GMs. My hope is that the players will get involved and post comments with THEIR version (or better yet, their CHARACTERS version) of the events...